EXPERIMENT WITH NITROGEN. 43 



corn I ever saw ; but I got ninety-eight bushels. I weighed 

 every basket of it on the scales. 



There is another question which Capt. Moore opened here, 

 upon which I want to relate an experiment which I have 

 been trying. He says, that, when he manures a piece of 

 land for any crop, he puts on a good stout dressing of barn- 

 yard or stable manure, and then he uses his judgment about 

 what kind of fertilizer to put on ; that, for the onion-crop, 

 he will apply potash, because that crop takes a large quantity 

 of potash ; that, for some other crops, he would put on nitro- 

 gen, because they take largely of nitrogen ; and on still others, 

 phosphoric acid, because they take largely of phosphoric 

 acid. Now, I experimented with corn : I took a plot of 

 land ; and on a part of it I put just the quantity of phos- 

 phoric acid, nitrogen, and potash that are found in the corn- 

 crop. Knowing as I do, and as everybody knows, that there 

 is a large amount of nitrogen in the air, that the great 

 reservoir of nitrogen for our crops is the air, I left out on 

 a part of the plot one-quarter of the nitrogen, and on another 

 part one-half of the nitrogen. The corn from each plot was 

 measured by weigiiiug, and the shrinkage in the corn was 

 approximate to the quantity of nitrogen which I left out. I 

 know of the same experiment being tried in other places 

 upon the same crop, and with almost universally the same 

 result, or approximately the same result : therefore I do 

 not believe that we can depend altogether upon our analyses 

 in determining how much of this thing or that we shall 

 apply. In the first place, it is a very uncertain quantity. 

 What is " a good stout (.dressing of barnyard-manure " ? 

 Capt. Moore's manure may be worth four times as much as 

 his next neighbor's ; and we do not know, we have not any 

 measure of, what Ave want to put on in barnyard-manure, 

 I do not advocate throwing this away : all the waste mate- 

 rial, as Capt. Moore says, should be first completely util- 

 ized ; then we can buy our fertilizers in the market ; and 

 at the present day we can buy just what we want to buy, 

 and we can know just what it is, and just how much it con- 

 tains, and we can put it on, and uniformly produce the same 

 results, or approximately the same results ; and thus really 

 the commercial fertilizers that are in the market have an 

 advantage over barnyard-manure at the present day, in that 



